Saturday 29 June 2013
Thursday 27 June 2013
Not birds
We have now been just short of a week in Colombo but as I am yet to establish an internet connection, this may well be a very sporadic start to this blog. Also, for now, it'll be a pictureless start to what I imagine to be a picture heavy blog.
Rather than try to compress the entire first flush of our experience here in a few paragraphs I'll just relate something I saw with the kids today (Anu has gone straight to work after our first weekend). It was late morning and pretty hot already; we had hopped a tuktuk down the road to a little park nest to a large new lakeside hotel called Water's Edge. Iris walked beside me with her Ethiopian ballerina umbrella as a parasol and Arlo sat in the pushchair in his Foreign Legion hat. The park is very near our temporary accommodation and the lake immediately attracted me with the splendidly kitsch swan paddle boats.
The park is a little walkway around some swamp bushes that are peppered with egrets perched in the branches and a little Disney park-in-the-park housing white rabbits and spotted deer in a little fake standing stone grotto. The walkway is painted so that the road looks like a river running into a very low budget tromp l'oil waterfall that prompts people to continually pose for photos.
I have been keeping my eyes open for all the new fauna and flora but, as ever, I especially watch the bird life. So, spotting two large birds flying low over the water, more or less towards us I kept half an eye on them, though they didn't seem to be much more promising than a couple of rooks. As they drew closer I noticed the crescent-cut back edge to the wings and then saw furry orange pimp collars and realised that they were two huge bats (flying foxes I think) just casually heading by.
Rather than try to compress the entire first flush of our experience here in a few paragraphs I'll just relate something I saw with the kids today (Anu has gone straight to work after our first weekend). It was late morning and pretty hot already; we had hopped a tuktuk down the road to a little park nest to a large new lakeside hotel called Water's Edge. Iris walked beside me with her Ethiopian ballerina umbrella as a parasol and Arlo sat in the pushchair in his Foreign Legion hat. The park is very near our temporary accommodation and the lake immediately attracted me with the splendidly kitsch swan paddle boats.
The park is a little walkway around some swamp bushes that are peppered with egrets perched in the branches and a little Disney park-in-the-park housing white rabbits and spotted deer in a little fake standing stone grotto. The walkway is painted so that the road looks like a river running into a very low budget tromp l'oil waterfall that prompts people to continually pose for photos.
I have been keeping my eyes open for all the new fauna and flora but, as ever, I especially watch the bird life. So, spotting two large birds flying low over the water, more or less towards us I kept half an eye on them, though they didn't seem to be much more promising than a couple of rooks. As they drew closer I noticed the crescent-cut back edge to the wings and then saw furry orange pimp collars and realised that they were two huge bats (flying foxes I think) just casually heading by.
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